Do the religious want scientific enquiry to end?

That was the point about supernovae. The flash we see from a super nova is millions or billions of years old, depending on how far away it is. By looking at the data, people much smarter than I can see what the decay rates must have been at the time and place of the supernova. Every time we've measured those, we come to the same conclusions, that place and time have no effect on decay rates, thus there is absolutely no reason to think the decay rates have changed, and more than enough evidence to show they haven't.

There are only a couple assumptions, everything else is derived from objective evidence and those assumptions.The thing is, even if you grant the assumptions as the basis for both C14 dating and supernova studies, it seems quite miraculous, if you'll excuse the term, that those two assumptions which have nothing to do with one another at first, end up showing the exact same thing. It's almost as if...dare I say it...the assumptions were right. So while Creationists may be able to jump on the "but those are based on assumptions" bandwagon and get some traction, they can't argue they're wrong until they show us their own assumptions that lead to consistent results across multiple disciplines.For example, if we somehow assume that decay rates have changed, how does that effect the dates of specimens we've studied? Once you have those conclusions, what does that say about the supernova measurements? What do those assumptions say about radioactivity halos? You can't make an assumption to "fix" one scientific answer without altering a whole host of other ones. Those other conclusions will rapidly degenerate into conflicting consequences, or at least make it at least as improbable as before that the creationist's beliefs were right.

As Admin Nosy has stated, this is best for a different thread. You can check out RAZD's excellent thread about dating methods. I can always respond to your post over there with some cites...ask and ye shall receive.